I returned home from Spain in the fall of 1937. Soon after arriving, I heard for the first time the malicious rumors which had preceded me. I was being accused of leaving the front without permission, of running away.
Browder’s first words to me were, “Harry, had you been a better organizer you wouldn’t have gotten into that fix.”
I had to admit that there was some truth in this. I’d done pretty well in Chicago, but there I had the benefit of collective leadership! In Spain, a more experienced organizer would have moved cautiously, not impulsively as I had. He would have made a more careful analysis of the situation, arrived at an estimate of exactly what could be done and not allowed himself to be pushed into premature action. As a staff officer, I lived in brigade head* quarters, separately from the men in the trenches. A more experienced organizer would have made a greater effort to get out among the men and spend less time at headquarters.
I had made some mistakes in Spain. But I did not feel anything I had done warranted the type of rumor and slander that I was noW confronted with. I had led the struggle to improve conditions in the brigade after Jarama. I had made tactical errors in carrying out thil struggle, but I expected and felt I deserved the support of our leading comrades. Now I found myself the victim of a rumor campaign that could only have started in Spain.
I felt that at least the brigade leadership, which now included
Hlpvc Nelson and Lawrence, could have explained to the men why Hid how it was decided that I should leave the front. But they never 41(1, Instead, it was left that “Harry Haywood left the front,” providing fertile soil for rumor mongering.
I was in no position to fight the rumors, however. First, I Hwltated to bring the whole business out into the open in the midst Itl I he war. Also, to defend myself would necessitate bringing back In 1 he forefront people and events which had drifted into history as Ihe bitter fighting in Spain continued. Gal had been dismissed from the Republican Army for mistakes, including the criminal blunders at Jarama; Nathan was killed; Cunningham and Aitken repatriated; Klaus had been transferred to the Thaelmann Brigade; and only Copic remained of the old leadership.1 The men who itit vived Jarama were veterans now. And most significantly, the gtoNs command errors at Jarama’s Pingarron Heights were not repeated, thus pushing these events into the background where (hey lost the sharp significance they had while I was in Spain.
1 was demoralized and depressed. I had no other course but to accept the decision to leave the matter in abeyance until a later (lute. The rumors, however, persisted—undermining my role as a leading Party member and questioning my integrity. At the time I law this slander campaign as an unwarranted attack and, personally, as a tremendous setback. Only years later was I able to see how this attack on a leading Black cadre was part of the overall thrust in the leadership of the Party to liquidate the national question and our leading role in the struggle. That is, the III owderite leadership made good use of the political in-fighting in Npuin.
The sharpest attacks came from James Ford. He lost no time in moving to take advantage of my loss of prestige as a result of Npnin. In my absence, Ford had continued to build his one-man leadership of Afro-American work. Under his influence, the Harlem leaders tended to become a closed group; anyone who did not provide Ford with uncritical support was suspected of being "anl ¡-leadership.” As head of the National Negro Commission, Ford tried to extend his style of leadership to the national scene.
In this, he had the active support of Browder who played upon
I returned home from Spain in the fall of 1937. Soon after arriving, I heard for the first time the malicious rumors which had preceded me. I was being accused of leaving the front without permission, of running away.
Browder’s first words to me were, “Harry, had you been a better organizer you wouldn’t have gotten into that fix.”
I had to admit that there was some truth in this. I’d done pretty well in Chicago, but there I had the benefit of collective leadership. In Spain, a more experienced organizer would have moved cautiously, not impulsively as I had. He would have made a more careful analysis of the situation, arrived at an estimate of exactly what could be done and not allowed himself to be pushed into premature action. As a staff officer, I lived in brigade headquarters, separately from the men in the trenches. A more experienced organizer would have made a greater effort to get out among the men and spend less time at headquarters.
I had made some mistakes in Spain. But I did not feel anything I had done warranted the type of rumor and slander that I was now confronted with. I had led the struggle to improve conditions in the brigade after Jarama. I had made tactical errors in carrying out this struggle, but I expected and felt I deserved the support of our leading comrades. Now I found myself the victim of a rumor campaign that could only have started in Spain.
I felt that at least the brigade leadership, which now included
Steve Nelson and Lawrence, could have explained to the men why and how it was decided that I should leave the front. But they never did. Instead, it was left that “Harry Haywood left the front,” providing fertile soil for rumor mongering.
I was in no position to fight the rumors, however. First, I hesitated to bring the whole business out into the open in the midst of the war. Also, to defend myself would necessitate bringing back to the forefront people and events which had drifted into history as the bitter fighting in Spain continued. Gal had been dismissed from the Republican Army for mistakes, including the criminal blunders at Jarama; Nathan was killed; Cunningham and Aitken repatriated; Klaus had been transferred to the Thaelmann Brigade; and only Copic remained of the old leadership.1 The men who survived Jarama were veterans now. And most significantly, the gross command errors at Jarama’s Pingarron Heights were not repeated, thus pushing these events into the background where they lost the sharp significance they had while I was in Spain.
I was demoralized and depressed. I had no other course but to accept the decision to leave the matter in abeyance until a later date. The rumors, however, persisted—undermining my role as a leading Party member and questioning my integrity. At the time I saw this slander campaign as an unwarranted attack and, personally, as a tremendous setback. Only years later was I able to see how this attack on a leading Black cadre was part of the overall thrust in the leadership of the Party to liquidate the national question and our leading role in the struggle. That is, the Browderite leadership made good use of the political in-fighting in Spain.
The sharpest attacks came from James Ford. He lost no time in moving to take advantage of my loss of prestige as a result of Spain. In my absence, Ford had continued to build his one-man leadership of Afro-American work. Under his influence, the Harlem leaders tended to become a closed group; anyone who did not provide Ford with uncritical support was suspected of being “anti-leadership.” As head of the National Negro Commission, Ford tried to extend his style of leadership to the national scene.
In this, he had the active support of Browder who played upon
Ford’s personal ambitions with uncritical praise, referring to him as “the Frederick Douglass of our time.” As a result, he became one of Browder’s key henchmen. Ford also continued a vendetta against the older comrades, which eventually led to the expulsion of Briggs and Moore.2 Before Spain, I had sufficient prestige as a leader and theoretician in my own right to resist this tendency. But now with my standing largely eroded by the difficulties in Spain, Ford moved to consolidate his position and oust me from leadership once and for all.
Although I had my differences with Ford, I did not expect the type of veiled attack which he launched. This attack was revealed through a series of underhanded blows. The first was an article I had written as part of the Party’s pre-convention discussion in early 1938. The article, “The White South and the People’s Front,” was submitted to The Communist, the Party’s theoretical organ. It was a polemic against Francis Franklin, a young Southern intellectual who was at the time the head of the Education Department of the YCL.
He had published an article in the January 1938 issue of The Communist, “For a Free, Happy and Prosperous South,”3 which minimized the role of revolutionary Reconstruction and made unwarranted concessions to reactionary distortions of the period, particularly concerning the role of the “carpetbaggers.” Under the guise of winning the white Southern masses to our program, he distorted the revolutionary thrust of Reconstruction. His article was, in effect, an attack on some of the basic tenets of our revolutionary position. I answered in my article (published in April 1938) by reasserting our position on the revolutionary role of Reconstruction and the so-called carpetbag rule as the most democratic period that the South had ever known.4
To my surprise, I picked up the April issue of The Communist and saw that my article had been printed just as I wrote it, but under the name of Theodore Bassett. Bassett was one of James Ford’s inner circle and educational director in Harlem. I approached V.J. Jerome (The Communist editor) to find out what had happened. Jerome stated that Ford had insisted that my name be removed from the article for “political reasons.” Obviously
Ford pirated this article to prevent me from regaining any prominence and in order to enhance the prestige of his Harlem leadership. He was able to do this by invoking my “Spanish difficulties” as a reason for not allowing my name to appear in print.
The Tenth Convention of the CPUSA was held in New York in May 1938. There I was removed from the Politburo and the Central Committee. My name was simply omitted from the slate of candidates submitted to the convention by the presiding committee. Browder was the person who informed me of the move, citing the reason of “mistakes made in Spain.”
After twelve years of being on the Party payroll, I was suddenly faced with the need to find employment outside. For a well-known communist, it was not easy.
In the summer of 1939, the World’s Fair opened in New York City. Isadore Schneider, a left-wing writer and poet, headed up the publicity for the Soviet pavillion. He took me on as his assistant. My job was to popularize the pavillion among Blacks and to publicize Soviet achievement in solving national and racial questions. It was an interesting job. I put advertisements in the Black press and organized delegations of prominent Black leaders to visit the exhibit. We held a press conference of Black editors and invited them to dinner at the pavillion. My still fluent knowledge of Russian proved very useful and I translated for the Soviet guides when groups visited.
It wasn’t long before Ford got wind of my activities, however. He told me angrily, “You know you shouldn’t have taken this job...you’re too well known a communist.” According to him, public relations should be handled by a non-Party person— otherwise the effort to publicize the exhibit would be narrowed. I certainly didn’t agree with what he had said and told him so. But he insisted that I resign or he would take steps to have me removed. I went to see Schneider and learned that Ford had already talked to him. I had been red-baited before, but always by the police or bourgeois press. Ford had added a new twist! I collected my wages and left.
Ford’s vendetta continued through the summer of 1939. As the outbreak of world war approached, Japanese imperialists were stepping up a propaganda campaign directed at Blacks in the U.S. Claiming to be the champions of the colored races, they attempted to use the national liberation movement of Blacks for their own purposes against their U.S. imperialist rivals, and to disrupt the popular anti-fascist forces.
Cyril Briggs and I wrote a pamphlet to counter this pro-Japanese movement among Blacks.5 This pamphlet refuted their spurious propaganda and exposed the Japanese plunder of north China and their imperialist designs for Southeast Asia. The Negro Commission allowed the pamphlet to be published, but only after Ford had added his name and those of his close associates, Theodore Bassett and Abner Berry.
In the early fall, Jack Stachel, national organizational secretary, called me into his office and asked if I wanted to go to Baltimore to head up Afro-American work for the Maryland district, which included Washington, D.C.
I welcomed the opportunity to return to work as a Party organizer and saw it as an indication that the personal attacks were coming to an end. Maryland provided a challenging place to work. There was the giant Bethlehem Steel plant, Sparrows Point, which had a significant number of Black workers. The drive to organize little steel had suffered a defeat at the 1937 Memorial Day Massacre in south Chicago. Now the drive was regaining momentum. As one of the largest eastern seaports, the Baltimore waterfront was a hotbed of activity, lead by the doughty, dynamic and energetic Pat Whelan.
There were also important Black liberation struggles in the district. Baltimore was the scene of anti-police repression campaigns, and the Eastern Shore—a former slave breeding center and actually part of the Black Belt—was the sight of periodic lynchings and frame-ups.
I stayed about a year before the shadow of Spain crept up on me. One of my most important tasks was organizing for the Third National Convention of the National Negro Congress. The organizing in preparation for the convention and the meeting itself provided important impetus for all the work in the district.
John P. Davis, executive secretary of theNNC, asked to borrow some funds for the convention, promising to repay us as soon as it was over. I supported this request and we lent the NNC money from district funds. But Davis was unable to repay us as he had promised. Fields, the district organizer, took exception to this and we clashed sharply. Before the situation could be resolved, Fields went to the national office without my knowledge. He was able to convince them that I was not needed in the district. I was soon withdrawn, returning to New York in the fall of 1939.
World War II, with its beginning in the fascist invasion of Ethiopia, China and Spain, broke out in earnest with Hitler’s lightning conquest of Poland in September 1939. The imperialist governments of France, Great Britain and the U.S., which had been following a policy of appeasement towards the building up of the German war machine in the hopes of using it in an armed invasion of the Soviet Union, now found themselves threatened. Their schemes against the Soviets had been shaken by the nonaggression pact signed by the Soviets with Germany in August 1939.
The Soviet policy had consistently urged joint action against fascist aggression, but the capitalist governments were not interested. The Soviets offered to defend Czechoslovakia, but the French refused to put their mutual defense pact into effect. The Soviets offered to defend Poland on the eve of the German invasion, but Poland refused to allow the Red Army units to cross the border. The British stubbornly refused any type of mutual assistance pact with the Soviet Union, hoping all the time for war between Germany and Russia.
The Soviets thus moved to defend themselves and thwart this imperialist scheme, signing the non-aggression pact with Germany—a brilliant and necessary diplomatic move.
Despite the fact that France and Britain were pledged to assist Poland, they did nothing in response to Hitler’s invasion. For six months, neither side made a military move against the other. This period, the “phony war,” was used by the western imperialists in a final attempt to turn the war against the Soviets.
On November 30, 1939, war broke out between the Soviet
Union and Finland. The immediate cause was German-inspired Finnish incursions into Soviet territory, greatly encouraged and fostered by attempts by the British and French to foment war against the Soviet Union.
But Hitler had his own plan. Realizing the impossibility of waging war on both eastern and western fronts, he moved against the weaker opponents. In April 1940, German troops marched into Denmark and Norway. Finland proved the utter bankruptcy of British and French policy by allying itself with the fascists. On May 28, the supposedly invincible armies of France were defeated and the British were driven into the sea at Dunkirk. In rapid succession, the countries of western Europe came under Nazi control. Thus satisfied that his western front was secure and not considering the British a serious threat to his rear, Hitler turned his attention eastward. Viciously occupying Yugoslavia, Greece and Albania, and bringing Bulgaria into the war as a fascist ally, Hitler overran the Balkans and prepared for his decisive blow of the war—the Soviet Union.
The initial stage of the war (September 1939 to June 1941) was dominated by the imperialist powers and was a war for world domination. Our policy called for active support of China and all oppressed peoples in their struggles against fascism and for national independence. It called for ending the war as rapidly as possible on the basis of a democratic peace. Our main slogan was “Keep America out of the imperialist war!”
The great sentiment for peace was reflected in the positions of both the AFL and the CIO which went on record as opposing U.S. participation in the war. United front organizations such as the NNC, the Southern Congress for Human Welfare and others adopted similar positions.
Probably the largest of the many peace activities was the American Peace Mobilization, formed in Chicago on August 31, 1940. It consisted of over 6,000 delegates representing about
12,000,000 people in trade unions, youth organizations, women’s clubs and Black groups. Under the banner of “For a People’s Peace,” it fought against further extension of the war.
In October 1939, a few weeks after the fascist conquest of
Poland, I found myself in the Veteran’s Hospital at Kingsbridge Road in the Bronx. I suffered a serious heart attack. My condition was found to be service connected; the result of the endocarditis I had suffered while in the Army during the First World War. This time the diagnosis was valvular heart disease. I was awarded full compensation, one hundred dollars per month, by the Veterans’ Administration.
R &R IN THE SAN FERNANDO VALLEY
After three months’ recuperation, I was released from the hospital and advised to take a long rest. Thinking that I might be incapacitated for life, I decided to go to Los Angeles, arriving there in the winter of 1940.1 rented a small bungalow on the property of a comrade in the San Fernando Valley and stayed there over a year. It was on Van Nuys Road near the Pacoima Reservoir.
My stay was very restful and I became a member of the Southern California District of the Party. There was a good Party organization in the valley and a relatively large circle of sympathizers. The comrades were very solicitous towards me.
Our Party branch actively organized in the valley for the American Peace Mobilization and we were able to send a strong delegation to Chicago as part of the Los Angeles contingent. Although still recuperating, I helped with this work by giving talks and leading discussions on the international situation and the progress of the war.
It was in California that I met an old comrade, Belle Lewis, who had also come from the east to recuperate from an illness. I was happy to see her again, having known her back east during the National Miners Strike of 1931. She was a veteran communist and organizer for the National Miners Strike Relief Organization in “bloody” Harlan County. During the strike, she had been jailed along with five other women who were framed up and known as the Kentucky Six. Later she was a section organizer in Boston’s Black ghetto.
Belle was a handsome, warm-hearted woman in her early thirties. She had Slavic features, with a broad face and high cheek bones. We were both lonely and struck it off quite well together. She came to live with me in the valley and later we were formally married. Our union was to last fifteen years.
On June 22, 1941, Hitler launched his attack against the Soviet Union. This fateful action dramatically changed the character of the war and was in fact, the beginning of the end for Hitler. Hitler’s armies marched deep into the Soviet Union, but in the winter of 1941-42 the heroic effort of the Russian people stopped the German offensive at Leningrad and Moscow.
A regrouped German army launched another offensive in the spring of 1942, aimed at Stalingrad. For months the city was under siege, but the powerful Germans could not take the city. The epic Battle of Stalingrad was ended January 31, 1943, with the decisive defeat of Hitler’s crack Sixth Army.
With the invasion of the Soviet Union, our Party’s policy towards the war changed. It was no longer possible to limit the spread of the war; it was now a people’s war aimed at the defeat of fascism. The bombing of Pearl Harbor ended any lingering hope that America could stay out of the war. Our slogans became, “Everything for National Unity!” and “Everything for Victory!”
By the time Hitler hurled his war machine against the Soviet Union, my health had improved and I was feeling as good as ever. Belle and I decided to move into L.A. proper and become more active in Party affairs. Browder had sent a letter to the district secretary, Carl Winter, to the effect that the Spanish incident was not to be held against me and I was to be given an opportunity to make my contributions to the Party. Pettis Perry was at the time head of Afro-American work in the district.
Although I wasn’t aware of it at the time, in hindsight it’s clear that under Browder’s leadership Ford had already set on a course which was to lead to the liquidation of the Party’s revolutionary position on the Black national question. The Party had already dissolved the Sharecroppers Union and, under the pretext of building the united front, was slurring over the special demands of Blacks in all its areas of work.
The Party’s correct position for consolidating the united front, the declaration of national unity under the slogans, “Everything for the war effort!” and “Everything for victory over worldwide fascist slavery!” was however accompanied by a serious undermining of the Party’s leading role and its ideological strength. The tendency to subordinate the class struggle to Roosevelt’s New Deal policy had manifested itself earlier in the liquidation of the Party’s factory units, shop papers and trade union fractions. ¿/Now this tendency was revealing itself in distortions of the nostrike pledge and hiding the face of the Party. Belle brought this home to me in regards to her work in a war industry plant in Los Angeles. She was very dissatisfied and angry because according to the line she was supposed to remain in the background— promoting non-Party people for union leadership. In many cases, and her plant was a good example, the no-strike pledge was interpreted to mean little, if any, struggle around working conditions or safety. The Party demanded virtually no concessions from the factory owners in return for the guarantee that workers would not strike during the course of the war.
A similar tendency of slurring over the special demands of Blacks had begun to creep into the work. An example of this was the fact that despite the active role the Party played in the struggle for the FEPC (an executive order to outlaw discrimination against Blacks in war industries), it found itself tailing the NAACP and A. Philip Randolph when it came to organizing support for the measure.
I saw these tendencies as deviations or individual mistakes which would be corrected—not as symptoms of a developing opportunist line, a pattern of abdicating the leading role of the Party.
Somewhat divorced from the struggle going on in the Party, Belle and I moved into ,an apartment on Forty-second Street and Crocker in the Central Avenue district, the heart of Los Angeles’s Black ghetto. We immediately got to work, and in no time we were able to build up a Party branch of about fifty Blacks, some of the finest young people I have ever met. Most were from Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas and Louisiana—part of the first wave of migrations to the new war industries in and around Los Angeles.
The branch secretary was one of the local people, with Belle as membership director and myself as education director. We held
discussions and meetings on national and international problems, as well as questions confronting the community.
We were elated with our success, but it was not shared by the district office downtown. Pettis Perry had tried to direct the Afro-American work from his office, rather than establishing a base in the community. The work obviously suffered from this isolation and he was jealous of our success. Our house was always open to comrades and quickly became a center for activity in the area.
It wasn’t long before we began hearing rumors which referred to Belle and myself as the “uptown braintrust” and accused us of “establishing a second center.” Angered and fed up with those false charges, covert accusations and innuendos, I decided to get a job. Although my health seemed excellent, I was wary of my heart condition.
I went to the state rehabilitation office for a check-up to see if I was fit to work. To my surprise, I-passed the examination with flying colors. The examining doctor told me my heart was in good condition and he saw no reason why I couldn’t do anything I had done before. Encouraged, I asked if I could go to sea.
“Certainly, but I wouldn’t advise you to be anything like a stevedore,” he said. Still, I was told I was unable to join the Army.
SIGNING UP WITH THE NMU
In June 1943,1 enlisted as a seaman in the Merchant Marine at San Pedro, California, the port of Los Angeles. Just as millions around the world, I wanted to make some contribution to the fight against fascism. I knew the history of struggle of the National Maritime Union and had long been an admirer of the militant seamen’s union.
The NMU was the largest of all seamen’s unions, reaching a membership of about 100,000 during the war. Its forerunner had been the Marine Workers Industrial Union, organized by the the SIU (an AFL-dominated seaman’s union). The TUUL union dissolved and sent its membership into the SIU. They later helped to lead the rank-and-file revolt against the bureaucratic leadership of the SIU. This revolt led to the founding of the NMU as a CIO union in 1936. Its history was marked by bloody strikes in 1936 and 1937 in which several members were killed by thugs and police.
Through this fierce struggle and with the Party’s correct leadership, the NMU became one of the most militant, dedicated and highly organized of all the CIO unions. The union was in the leadership of the anti-fascist movement both at home and abroad. It actively supported the anti-lynch bill, demanded full employment and a permanent FEPC. When Italian fascists invaded Ethiopia, NMU seamen refused to sail ships to Italy. Later they refused to sail steel-laden ships and tankers for Japan. In the midst of very important union struggles, some 800 union members left their picketlines for Spain. Over 200 died in the attempt to defeat the fascist offensive and prevent a new world war.
NMU seamen were known as worldwide emissaries of labor. They would contact local unions wherever they docked, offering assistance and support and often participating in labor marches and demonstrations.6
As head of the Party’s Afro-American work, I had known many of the old-timers in the SIU and had worked with some of the men who helped to found the NMU. These included A1 Lannon, Patty Whelan, Tom Ray, Johnny Rogan, Hursel Alexander, Roy Hudson, George Mink, Josh Lawrence and Ferdinand Smith. The latter two were Blacks and both were on the national board of the union. Smith became the national secretary and Josh, a boatswain, became port agent for the Great Lakes.
A few days after I enlisted, I signed on the Union Oil Company’s tanker, La Placentia. I had no training besides as a waiter so I chose the job of crew messman, serving the crew at meals and cleaning up. I was the only Black in the crew. We were bound for Pearl Harbor and Honolulu. Our tanker served as mother ship for a dozen or so PT boats on their way to the Pacific war zone, refueling them on the voyage across and relying on them to serve as our escort.
These boats (patrol torpedo craft) were small, fast and heavily armed. They carried a minimal crew of three officers and eleven men. Armed with four torpedos, two rocket launchers, twenty millimeter anti-aircraft guns, thirty-seven millimeter cannon and fifty caliber machine guns, PT boats were pound-for-pound the most heavily armed ships in the war.
In the months following Pearl Harbor, the Japanese met with almost fantastic success in the Pacific and south Asia, despite the fact that their finest force, the Quantung Army, was tied down in north and east China by the armies of Russia and China. By May 1942, most of the major islands in the south Pacific had fallen to Japan, either wholly or in part. Bangkok, Hong Kong, Java, Wake, Guam and the Philippines were among the territories incorporated into Japan’s “co-prosperity” empire. Australia was threatened with invasion from the north; Darwin, a northern port city, had already been attacked by the Imperial Air Force. When Burma fell to the Japanese, land supply routes to embattled China were effectively cut and Japan had a base from which to launch an invasion of India.
It wasn’t until May 1942, at the battle of the Coral Sea, that the Japanese met their first big setback. It was here that they were prevented from taking Port Moresby, Papua, and possibly invading Australia. In the next few months, they suffered major defeats at Midway and Guadalcanal. As we headed into the Pacific war zone, ten months after Guadalcanal, the allies were preparing to launch their major offensive in the south Pacific.
After two weeks at sea, we landed at Pearl Harbor. In December 1941, it had been the scene of the massive Japanese raid on the Pacific fleet. Now, a year and a half later, the wreckage of Admiral Kimmel’s once proud fleet was strewn over the harbor. Thousands of victims still lay in the hulls.
I went ashore with some shipmates. We took a bus to Honolulu, a few miles away. I found war-time Honolulu pretty drab. The streets, busses and amusement places were crowded with U.S. military and naval personnel.
We went into a bar on Bishop Street in downtown Honolulu and the white bartender-proprietor refused to serve me. He apologetically said that he had nothing against Blacks personally, but that there had been a bloody fight between Black and white soldiers there just a week before. For that reason he had decided not to serve Blacks at all. My white shipmates started to protest, but I said, “Aw, come on, don’t bother.” It wasn’t worth the hassle. We just walked out and went to another bar.
The Marines and the Navy, serving as Shore Patrol in Pearl Harbor at the time, were generally arrogant and belligerent toward us civilian seamen. They called us draft dodgers, dollar chasers, reds and slackers. We had to swallow hard and just take it. If we fought back, we’d be thrown in the brig where we’d suffer even more abuse. We developed a real hatred for the Navy and the Marines.
Their hostility and the racism the military had brought over with it tended to sour my impressions of Hawaii. I had no regrets when, in a couple days we were on our way back to San Pedro. We returned without escort, having left the PT boats at Pearl Harbor to supplement the allies’ Pacific fleet.
Two weeks later we left San Pedro again, retracing our last voyage back to Hawaii. By this time, the allies were engaged in fierce battles to retake the Japanese-occupied territories on New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. In six months, as the result of these and later actions, Japan’s eastern front would be wide open.
We brought with us another escort of PT boats. Again we dropped the PT boats at Pearl Harbor, but this time we headed southwest to Pago Pago in the American Samoas. It was not a busy port, we were the only ship in the harbor. The Polynesians there were among the friendliest people I had ever met. They had light brown skin and looked like any mulatto that one might see on the streets of Harlem or Chicago’s Southside. Families would invite us to visit their homes.
Our next port was Noumea, New Caledonia, a French possession about 800 miles east of Australia which had formerly been a penal colony. The New Caledonians were Melanesians, big fine looking Blacks with wooly hair. My interest in anthropology had led me to read extensively about these “Asian Negroes” and I was glad to have the opportunity to meet them first hand.
After about ten days there, discharging our fuel and refueling small naval craft coming in from the Solomons, we finally sailed
out past the coral reefs and were on our way home.
At that time, merchant ships were more heavily armed than they had been earlier in the war. Our tanker mounted two three-inch cannons, fore and aft, and several twenty-millimeter rapid firing Swiss anti-aircraft guns. On our ship these guns were manned by a Navy gun crew of eighteen men commanded by a lieutenant junior grade. We merchant seamen performed a vital support role for the armed guard detachment. I served as assistant loader on one of the anti-aircraft guns.
In the early morning, about two days out of Noumea, a general alarm was sounded. An unidentified ship had been sighted on the horizon off the port bow. We all rushed to our battle stations and waited. In wartime, we had to maintain radio silence to avoid disclosing our position. We waited for the ship to come close enough to identify it. We knew we wouldn’t have a chance against a Japanese warship; it would have blown us out of the water. We were all relieved when the alarm was finally called off, the vessel had been identified as the U.S. troop ship West Point.
Back home after a couple of weeks in Los Angeles, we got the news that a big troop ship was crewing up in San Pedro. It was the Uruguay, a former luxury liner on the New York-Buenos Aires run that had been leased to the military by Moore-McCormack lines. She had now been converted into a troop ship and had been carrying troops from the east coast to Oran and other ports in north Africa. Now she had come through the Panama Canal and around to the west coast.
Scuttlebutt had it that she was now to transport troops to the Pacific war zone. When they got the news that she was being transferred to the Pacific, half the original crew had gotten off in New York. She made the New York to San Pedro run with only half of her 450-man crew. She was carrying no troops at the time so it posed no big problem.
San Pedro was mainly a freighter and tanker port, supplying crews of between forty and sixty. The NMU local was hard put for men to fill out the Uruguay’s large crew and for the new crew ratings required for a large troop transport. The local had to send to San Francisco to help fill out the crew.
The NMU port agent in San Pedro at the time was Oliver Boutée, a progressive minded Black from New Orleans. The chief union patrolman—the number one port union official under the port agent—was Neil Crow, a tough experienced seaman and a well-respected communist. The union was determined to put together the best possible crew for the Uruguay and started by lining up a solid nucleus of good union seamen. One reason for the special effort was the rumors of racketeering aboard the Uruguay. It was a good opportunity to clean up the ship.
Racketeering on board ships—mainly gambling and selling illegal liquor to troops—was a crucial issue for the National Maritime Union. It was a matter of principle—the honor of the union was at stake. In spite of the NMU’s hundred percent backing of the war effort, merchant seamen were often the target of the kind of slanderous remarks I have already mentioned. Shipboard racketeering played into these slanders.
Racketeering also prevented the union from handling legitimate “beefs” about ship conditions. It divided the crew against itself and made it difficult to wage effective struggles to improve intolerable conditions; crowded and inadequately ventilated quarters, unsanitary heads, poor food and arbitrary disciplinary treatment from officers. Shipboard racketeers were strongly anti-union, undoubtedly often the result of deals made with the officers to look the other way from the rackets. Having never worked on a big ship, I was, at the time, only dimly aware of these problems and what they meant for the union.
ROUNDING THE CAPE
When the day arrived to crew up the Uruguay, the hiring hall was crowded. I recognized some familiar faces. Red Herrick was there, a veteran communist seaman and artist who had made the maiden voyage on the Booker T. Washington. The Washington was the first merchant ship to be commanded by a Black captain, Hugh Mulzac. Red was a fireman on the ship. I was surprised to see Hursel Alexander, a well-known Black communist leader from
Los Angeles who had never sailed before.
I stood in the crowded union hall, reading the long list of ratings that had to be filled. There were openings for cooks, bakers, waiters, pantrymen, utilitymen and others in the stewards’ department. I knew my skills were limited, but I had no desire to take another messman job. Neil Crow approached me and said, “We really want you on that ship, Harry. Take the chief pantryman’s job,” he told me.
I hesitated, wondering why thé job was posted when the third and fourth pantryman jobs were not. Why hadn’t anyone from the old crew wanted to move up to chief pantryman? I didn’t know if I was qualified; the job would put me in charge of about ten men, responsible for preparing salads and hors d’oeuvres, setting up and serving at steam tables and making beverages, coffee, tea and desserts for 400-500 officers.
Several friends of mine standing nearby also urged me to take the job. A young man whom I had just met in the hall, Herbert Jeffries, said, “I’ll support you, Harry. I’ll throw in my card for first pantryman.”
With the promise of their support, I agreed. When the dispatcher called out, “chief pantryman,” I stepped forward and threw in my card. No one else applied; there was no contest. I felt uneasy all over again, but I had the job.
Upon boarding ship, my ability to perform the chief pantryman’s job was immediately challenged by the chef. He was an Argentinian, an old chef from the Uruguay’s days as a luxury liner, and a rabid white chauvinist. When he saw me he scowled: “So you’re the chief pantryman!” I said I was.
“Well, make me up four gallons of French dressing, four gallons of thousand island, four gallons of Russian dressing, a gallon of tartar sauce and four gallons of mayonnaise.”
It was clearly a challenge to my ability, especially making mayonnaise from scratch. I was taken aback because I’d never done it before. I sought out Jeffries, who had promised to Imck me up, but he didn’t know how to make mayonnaise either. Fortunately the second pantryman, a Swede, stepped in and saved the day. I passed the chefs “test” to his great disappointment and had
no more problems of this type during the voyage.
We left San Pedro on November 9, 1943, bound for the South Pacific and eventually Bombay, India. Approximately 5,000 troops were on board. In contrast to the La Placentia, a large portion of Uruguay’s crew was Black, especially in the stewards’ department. On the first day out we organized a union ship committee which consisted of one delegate and an alternate delegate from each department—deck, engine and steward. A meeting of the crew was called and Red Herrick was elected ship chairman. The meeting was general, a statement of union principles was made, the need for a clean ship emphasized and every man urged to do his job. There was no controversy and it was uneventful.
Two or three days out, however, racketeering became the issue. My third and fourth pantrymen were arrested by the ship military police and charged with selling liquor to the soldiers. The military police had raided their bunkrooms and found the bulkheads packed with cases of liquor, a virtual warehouse of smuggled booze. How did they get all that contraband aboard, I wondered? Obviously these men had connections with shoreside gangsters. They were put in the brig for the remainder of the three month voyage. Now it was clear to me why these men had not put in for the chief pantryman’s job. They didn’t need the extra pay and didn’t want the extra responsibility.
But this was not all. The ship was swarming with a number of rackets. There was a cigarette racket, controlled by a storeman. He smuggled aboard entire cases of cigarettes and, when we reached Bombay, sold them at fantastic profits. But the greatest of all the rackets was the nightly crap and poker games. They were run by two glory hole (crews’ quarters) stewards, the lowest rating on the ship. The stewards were big-time professional gamblers and had the entire operation well organized. They were surrounded by toadies and sycophants who covered their jobs for them and even served them special food and the best scotch while they lay around all day in their bunks.
These men and their circle of cronies were corrupting a significant section of the crew and represented the main obstacle to any united action to improve conditions on the ship. In ship meetings they always were the greatest patriots and red-baited the union, warning against communists that were out to “disrupt” the ship. We struggled against these phonies during the entire three month voyage and after several tense incidents were finally able to isolate them.
Our first port of call was Hobart, Tasmania, an island southeast of Australia on the Tasman Sea. A few days before arriving, we picked up two Army transports which continued sailing with us all the way to Bombay.
Our stay was short, only twenty-four hours, but a welcome break after the long, lonely Pacific crossing. Hobart, a very pleasant town, was a resort and vacation area for Australians.
Leaving Hobart, we stood for Freemantle, the port of Perth on the west coast of Australia, sailing the rough seas of the Great Australian Bight. In Perth, I had my first impressions of Australia. It seemed a white man’s country to me then—I never saw any of the native inhabitants—but strangely I felt no antagonism. On the contrary, everyone was very friendly toward us Black seamen.
We were aware of the immigration bar against Asians and Blacks which was rigidly enforced. When asked about this, the Aussies assured us it wasn’t a racist law—“It’s got nothing to do with you guys...and certainly we’re friendly with the Chinese.”
I thought to myself, “Well they should be, for the Chinese were a major factor in preventing a Japanese fascist invasion of Australia by pinning down Japan’s main armies in north China.”
They told us, “It’s a law brought in by the labor government to prevent Australian capitalists from importing coolie labor and undercutting the white Australian workers.” The irony of this explanation didn’t even occur to the Australians.
We found ourselves warmly greeted as we went sightseeing through the city of Perth. Several members of an Australian artillery regiment invited us to “bring all our friends” and come to a dance that night at their barracks just outside of Freemantle. We turned out in large numbers and were waltzing Matildas^ all night long. It was a great party and didn’t break up until nearly daylight. When we sailed several days later, we bid them all goodbye.
We were glad to see the two Dutch cruisers that would escort us to Bombay. We felt these were particularly hostile waters since much of the territory on the coast of the Bay of Bengal was occupied by the Japanese, as were the Andaman Islands some 1,800 miles east of India. Even now, as we sailed through the Indian Ocean with our “cargo” of U.S. troops bound for Bombay, the Japanese were massing their forces in Burma preparatory to invading eastern India.
Six weeks out of San Pedro, we docked in Bombay. I wanted to find the Communist Party headquarters to see if it would be possible to meet with some of the Indian comrades I had known at KUTVA. This proved to be a simple task. I asked a longshoreman who gave me directions to the Party headquarters. Several comrades, Hursel Alexander, Red Herrick and I went downtown and found the Party headquarters. It was an impressive four or five story building on a main street, a red flag with hammer and sickle flying from its roof.
Walking in, we identified ourselves to the first person we saw—a young man who turned out to be a member of the Central Committee of the Indian Party. I explained that we were American communists and that I was interested in seeing some of the Indians I had known in Moscow. I didn’t know their real names, but I gave the young man several descriptions. He asked what years I had been in Moscow. When I said 1926-30, his face showed real interest.
“Well,” he said, “I think something can be arranged. Why don’t you and your friends come back here at about six o’clock for dinner?”
Hursel, myself and several others came back that evening and went upstairs. We took our shoes off in the hall as was the custom; and entered in our stocking feet. There they were, my old friends from Moscow. Nada, a beautiful Indian woman, rushed to embrace me. There was Sakorov, my old roommate and close friend, one of the founders of the Indian C.P. He told me he was now on the Central Committee and was Party representative to the National Indian Congress for the Bombay District.
There was also Patel, who had toured the United States before
the war as a representative of Indian students. His tour had been sponsored by the American Youth Congress. He was now Communist Party district organizer for Bombay. There were also several of the old Sikhs who grabbed me, “Harry! Harry!” My friends sat us down and we all ate and swapped tales about old times and about the political situation in our respective countries.
Ocean ever watchful for Japanese submarines which had been ' reported off Madagascar. As we neared Capetown, a notice appeared on the ship’s bulletin board, something to the effect that “the people of South Africa have certain customs and laws as to race. While they are not ours, we should all respect them, remember we are in their country and don’t start any trouble.”
A bunch of us, about half Black and half white, got off the ship together and went straight into a dockside bar. No sooner did we get in than the bartender started yelling, “Now wait a minute, fellows, the Blacks over here and the whites over there.”
Some of our white shipmates started to protest, but we Blacks said, “What the hell, we want a drink, man. We know this is South Africa. Damn it, you know we can’t fight this thing now—let’s get a drink.” We settled for salutes across the bar.
I went up to the Sixth District, Capetown’s Black ghetto, with some of my Black shipmates. I was never so depressed in my life.
The oppression of the people was complete. I’d seen nothing like it, f
even in “darkest Mississippi.” There Blacks at least had some kind ! of cultural institutions—churches, lodges and so forth. Here they had nothing. They had been forced from the land and pushed into oppressive native “reserves.” These reserves in turn served as labor reservoirs for the city, where blacks were crowded into ghettos and
their tribal structures and institutions completely destroyed. Their culture had been stolen from them. Whites were warned not to go into the area after dark, as a number of whites had been murdered there. This seemed like a kind of spontaneous rebellion to me.
As I walked down the street, I heard two Blacks speaking in a strange and beautiful language. I stopped and asked them what it was. They answered in perfect English that it was Xhosa, their tribal language. It sounded almost musical to me.
Back downtown, I went into a restaurant for natives, but the white owner refused to serve me. “ But I’m Black,” I protested. “Yeah, but you’re not one of ours.”
I made my way to the Communist Party headquarters and was surprised to find that like in Bombay, it was located on a main street downtown. There was a young white woman at the office to whom I introduced myself. She seemed to recognize my name. She was the wife of an Indian member of the Central Committee. She said, “It’s so unfortunate that you came through at this particular time. All the Central Committee people are in Jo’burg. There’s a big plenum going on this weekend. I’m sure my husband and others would have liked to have met you.”
I asked about some of the South Africans I had known in Moscow. She said that Bunting had died and that Roux was no longer in the Party, but still friendly.
“What’s this I hear about the Party in America?” she asked. I said that I didn’t know what she meant. “Well, it came over the radio last night that your Party is dissolving itself!”
This all came as a great surprise and shock to me. It was hard to believe. I knew there had been some backsliding and a general move to the right. But dissolve the Party? I wondered if there could have been some misunderstanding.
Before we boarded ship, we all met at the USO by the docks. This was the first time since we had come ashore that Black and white shipmates had been able to get together. We made the most of it, drinking beer and swapping stories. Herb Jeffries, a very lightskinned Black man with blondish hair and blue eyes, was a target of a lot of kidding. Herb’s brother, Howard, was a nationally-known singer with the Duke Ellington band.
When we had split up on leaving the dockside bar, Herb had no choice but to go with the whites. Now we had some fun at his expense. “You goddamn white son-of-a-bitch, you ratted on us. You left your own race.”
“You ran out on us at the docks, man. I don’t think we’ll let you back in the race,” said Hursel.
Herb was embarrassed and kind of felt bad. “What was I gonna do, man?’ he asked. “They wouldn’t serve me with you guys.” Hursel winked at me and we kept putting poor Herb on for some some time. What he said was true', though. In South Africa, he couldn’t pass for Black.
The struggle against the racketeers had been going on since we left San Pedro, and by the time we left Capetown we had them pretty well isolated. We had the goods on them and they knew it. We had built up a core of about twenty-five guys who played a leading role in the fight for better conditions and against these crooks.
Things were tense though. One evening I was on deck, leaning on the rail, when Red came up from the engine room. “Harry,” he said, “be careful about getting too near that rail at night. We’re in the middle of a hell of a fight and those bastards would love to dump you over!”
The ship’s committee met to draw up charges against the racketeers. Two or three of them were direct accusations. Clearly, we said, the racketeers were literally robbing the soldiers with their fixed games. They were obstructing the fight for better conditions on board by setting shipmates against each other. And finally, they were besmirching the name of the union.
As we headed up the south Atlantic, we called a general meeting to present the charges. A group of us got together beforehand to talk over the issues. Red Herrick, the ship chairman, was there as was Hursel Alexander. Hursel was short, not more than five feet four inches, with broad shoulders and a big roaring voice. He’d been one of the Party’s finest orators. Red said, “After all these points are made I want you to sum it up, Hursel. Really stir the crew up. Then, when you’re through, I’ll call for a vote right away.”
Red chaired the meeting and read the charges. Everybody had a
say and most everybody spoke against the racketeers. As I recall, they weren’t there, but their toadies did their red-baiting for them. The discussion went on for a considerable time. Finally Red recognized Hursel and that clinched it. The crew confirmed the charges and referred the crooks to a shoreside committee of the union for trial.
Crossing the Caribbean, we were anticipating the time when we’d return to San Pedro and get rid of these parasites. This would be no problem since San Pedro was a small port and union grievances could be processed quickly. We thought we had everything sewn up. Then one night, while several of us were standing on deck, one old seaman noticed, “We’re not sailing through any damn Panama Canal. We’re too far north. Look at those lights; there’s St. Thomas and that’s Puerto Rico. We’re going to New York, man!”
As the word spread, the crooks started getting cocky again. They knew the ropes in New York and stood a better chance of stalling things in such a large port. A few days later, the ship docked at the military base on Staten Island. Normally, crews were paid off at the end of a voyage with a union patrolman present who was able to handle grievances. But the military authorities would not allow our patrolman aboard ship. The crew was paid off outside the base and everyone who had been active in our union caucus was fired for “inefficiency.” By the time we could get through the red tape to raise the issues, the Uruguay was off shore, on its way to Oran, Algeria. The racketeers sailed with the ship while we were left in New York.
We put up at the Broadway Central Hotel and stayed there a couple of weeks. Nothing could be done about our grievances. Most of the guys went back to San Pedro—the shipping administration gave first class fare back to your home port. I decided to stay in New York and take advantage of the union’s program for members to upgrade their skills as cooks and bakers. I spent a month at Manual Arts High School on Thirteenth Street near Seventh Avenue, learning the rudiments of baking.
While I was in New York I went to see Bill Foster and check on what I’d heard in South Africa, about the Party being
dissolved. I went up to the ninth floor of the Party headquarters on East Thirteenth Street.
There was Foster, alone in his office, his feet on the desk, his hat pulled down to his eyes. He appeared to be in deep thought. “Hello, Harry, I hear you’re a seaman now,” he said.
I told him I’d just returned from an around the world voyage, and we talked awhile about the sea. Foster had years before been a sailor himself. Finally I told him what I heard in South Africa about the Party being dissolved.
“Yes,” he said, “that is what Browder has in mind.” When I asked what he planned to do about it, he said, “Let’s take a walk, the walls have ears...”
As we walked down University Place toward Washington Square, Foster explained how he saw Browder’s line. “It’s a rightist line,” I recall him saying. “One that just tails behind the bourgeoisie. He thinks they will voluntarily stick to the Teheran agreements. Browder is pushing the line that the American capitalists—for their own best interests—will continue the unity of the big three [the U.S., USSR and Great Britain—ed.] after the war is over. He wants us to continue the no-strike pledge, and is saying that there won’t be any more economic crises or wars or class conflicts—only peace and prosperity.”
Foster told me how Browder was then proposing to change the Party into an “association,” for this was in line with his view that the two-party system is adequate. What it all came down to is that he not only wanted to dissolve the Party—he wanted to liquidate Marxism.
Again I asked Foster what he was planning to do. I remember that his greatest concern was to avoid a split in the Party in the middle of a war.
“But,” I asked, “isn’t Browder going to dissolve the Party in the middle of the war? There certainly is an opposition, why not lead
it?’
He hedged, saying Browder was looking for the chance to expel him. By this time, we had returned to the Party headquarters. We agreed to keep in touch. What I did not know then was that Foster had written a letter to the National Committee opposing Brow-
der’s line. This letter was read at the Political Committee a few days before our conversation on February 8, 1944, and was opposed by every other committee member except Sam Darcy of Pennsylvania. Further, it had been made clear at the time that Foster would be expelled if he attempted to take the struggle against Browder to the rank and file.
This was a difficult time for me. I knew from discussions with others, especially seamen, that there was fairly widespread opposition to Browder’s position. But no one was sure what to do. The opposition existed, but it had no leadership. Browder was systematically violating democratic centralism by stifling any thorough discussion of his new policies. Thus the opposition in various parts of the country remained isolated from each other. I found myself feeling very much like many others. Browder’s business was really bad, but it was being steamrollered through. At the time, it seemed the only thing that could be done was to bide our time, waiting for events to expose Browder’s opportunism.
LIFE ABOARD THE ERICSSON
Late in March 1944,1 signed on as assistant baker on the John Ericsson, for the first of four voyages on that ship.
This was the period of preparation for the long-awaited second front in the European war. This had been deliberately delayed by Britain and the U.S. since 1917. The dominant theme in the relations between imperialist countries and the Soviet Union had been the former’s desire to crush the world’s first socialist state. The earliest manifestation of this had been their pouring over
900,000 troops into the Soviet Union in the early twenties to aid the white armies in the civil war. When the Red Army proved indomitable, their policy took the form of economic embargos and diplomatic boycotts. During the period of the Third Reich, the British, French and American governments saw their chance to move against the Soviets through a third party.
Thus, when Nazi Germany rose to become a major power, the imperialist powers followed a policy of appeasement and financial
support, hoping to induce the Germans to turn eastward. The U.S., Britain and France refused to take action against Germany’s illegal remilitarization, its reoccupation of the Rhineland, its support of the fascist invasions of Ethiopia and China, and its direct intervention in Spain.
The day after Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, this policy was articulated by then Senator Harry Truman who said, “If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany.”7
Even when circumstances forced Britain, France and the United States to ally themselves with the Soviet Union against the axis powers, this policy continued. The most striking example of this was their refusal to open up the second front in Europe until three years after the Nazi invasion of Russia. The Soviets thus bore the main brunt of the anti-fascist fight, and the number killed, perhaps
18,000,000, was twenty-seven times the total U.S. and English deaths combined.
By the time the second front was finally opened, the Red Army had already broken the back of Hitler’s Wehrmacht at Moscow, Leningrad and Stalingrad, and had crossed into Poland on its way to Berlin. The decision to land troops at Normandy was prompted as much by the British and American imperialists’ desire to prevent a Soviet sweep to the Atlantic as by their desire to shorten the war. It is, in fact, estimated that their delay in opening the second front prolonged the war by a full year.
The Ericsson was formerly a Swedish luxury liner, now leased to the U.S. as a troop ship. She usually carried about 5,000 troops on her trips from New York to Liverpool. We would go in a big convoy with a number of other troop ships and a number of escort vessels. The allies by that time were building up for the opening of the second front and the invasion of Normandy, which was to take place in June of that year. It took us about a month to make the round trip. We’d drop the troops in Liverpool and then sail up to Scotland.
There were four or five bakers and assistants in the Ericsson’s baking department. The chief baker was a Swede named Vidal. He
had been chief baker on the Ericsson when it was a luxury liner. He was a fine pastry chef and we baked bread for the whole ship, pastry for the officers.
Vidal outdid himself, making chocolate eclairs, bismarcks and Danish pastry. I loved the work and by the time I got off that ship, I could make all kinds of pastries. Vidal was a good teacher, but he was a little sore that all the young guys were learning so fast. He was from the old school and had been apprenticed to a baker at the age of twelve.
He used to tell us how the chief baker would stride in with his head up in the air and all the boys would greet him, “Good morning, Herr Chief Baker.”
“I had to wash pans for a year before they’d even let me touch the dough,” he would tell us, “and now you guys come on here and expect to be bakers in a few months.”
I also met Jake “the bread baker” Rabinowitz on the Ericsson. He was a specialist in sour dough bread. He’d come up the gangplank with a little satchel and all the old bakers would say, “Here comes Jake with that same old mother dough he’s had for twenty-five years.”
After we dropped the troops off we had a chance to see Liverpool. It was an old port city which had suffered heavily from Hitler’s blitz and large sections of the city lay in ruins. The pubs were fascinating places. They were real social centers where people spent the evening drinking beer and playing darts. The British were polite and someone would always come up to my table and strike up a conversation. Perhaps because I was Black, they would often raise criticisms of Americans which they didn’t mention to my white shipmates. They couldn’t stand the way some Americans were always boasting and carrying on about American superiority. The British were proud too, but in a quiet way.
“What’s wrong with the Yanks?” I’d ask when the subject came up.
“They’re over paid, over sexed and over here,” came the reply.
The German counter-offensive at the Battle of the Bulge was going on and the British followed it carefully. “The Yanks are getting it now,” they’d say. “Americans were so critical of our
fighting, but they’re finding out it’s no easy road.”
When we’d leave Liverpool, we’d go up to Glasgow, Scotland, and pick up German prisoners and wounded. It was easier to take them back to the U.S. than to ship food over for them. As our ship pulled out of Gourock, Glasgow’s port, the German prisoners would be assembled on the deck.
We’d ask, “Are there any bakers here?” Inevitably some would step forward because they knew they’d get better food if they worked in the kitchen. So on the return voyages we ship’s bakers could take it easy.
There were a lot of good fellows in our crew, but we were slow getting the ship organized. After my first voyage I got in touch with A1 Lannon, the Party’s waterfront organizer and member of the Central Committee. I asked about the possibility of getting one or two good Party men aboard to help us make the Ericsson a model union ship.
“Who’s in port here?” I asked Al.
“I’ll tell you just the guy you need. It’s Harry Rubin.”
“I’m not sure I know him.”
“He’s a man with tremendous drive and a hell of a dynamic organizer,” Al said. “You put him on that ship and he’ll be areal help. But I should warn you, he has a kind of puritanical streak. After a while he may do something or other and get himself isolated from the rest of the crew. You can use him for a couple of voyages, though.”
Rubin was a little fellow who walked with a limp as a result of being wounded in Spain. He signed on as wiper in the engine room, the lowest job there. Sure enough, he helped whip the whole thing together in short order. In no time at all we had the whole ship tightly organized. The committees and delegates in all the departments were functioning well. The crew was up to standard. We presented and won many grievances and improved the food and living conditions. There were classes for the crew on union history and improving technical skills. As educational director, I taught a course on the nature of fascism.
A couple of voyages later, there was an incident which proved Lannon’s cautions about Rubin to be correct. Rubin charged two
Puerto Rican crew members with selling a couple pints of liquor to two of the soldiers on board. The union had a strict policy on this sort of racketeering, but the attitude of most of the crew was, “We don’t want to press this too hard. It’s just a small case. Just tell them they can’t do it anymore.” There were no big racketeers aboard.
But Rubin took a hard line. He insisted that charges be brought against them and that they stand trial before the union port committee in New York. There was a division on the ship’s committee and many of us thought we should be a little flexible in this situation, but in the end we followed Rubin’s lead.
The incident made for hard feeling among the crew and divided the ship which we had worked so hard to organize. The union meeting on board which we called to discuss the charges was very heated. The defendants claimed the charges were an example of discrimination against Puerto Ricans. There were about fifty Puerto Ricans in the crew and about the same number of Blacks.
The defendants were able to line most of them up on their side. In truth, Puerto Ricans and Blacks had some real grievances. They were mostly in the steward’s department and many lived way down in the glory hole, the worst section of the ship. Also, the “evidence” against the defendants was flimsy and consisted of two affidavits signed by two soldiers long gone from the ship. The crew was split down the middle, and when the vote was called as to whether the defendants should be charged and stand trial in New York, about sixty percent voted no.
In later voyages, we were able to unite the crew under our leadership again. Rubin, however, didn’t sign on again because he, more than any of us, had isolated himself from the rest of the crew.
I quit the Ericsson in early September, 1944.1 planned to return to Los Angeles, but I had followed the Soviet counter-offensive with intense interest. The victories at Stalingrad and Leningrad and in the Crimea had pushed the Germans back beyond the border. Thus, I was determined to make the Murmansk run before I returned to the west coast.
I went down to the union hall on West Seventeenth Street. No one told where a ship was bound during the war, but when the
dispatcher called out, “Here’s that cold run. Get your heavy underwear on,” everyone knew what he meant.
I wanted to sign on as second cook and baker, but that job was already taken. The only rating I could take was crew messman, so I threw in my card. The ship was the Winfred L. Smith, docked in Jersey. I packed my bag, being sure to include my Russian grammar book and dictionary, and a Russian edition of Tolstoy’s War and Peace so that I could bone up on my once fluent knowledge of Russian. I then hurried to New Jersey and signed on.
We sailed on September 26, 1944, for Halifax, Nova Scotia, where the convoy assembled. We had a heavy escort of destroyers, cruisers, and corvettes as we headed for Glasgow, Scotland. After docking at Gourock on the Clyde, we headed north along the Scottish coast to Lock Ewe, where we reassembled for the last leg of the Murmansk run. A British commodore took over command of the convoy, calling a conference of captains to explain the procedures and route for making the dangerous run through the Norwegian Sea, around the North Cape to the Kola Inlet and Murmansk.
Leaving Lock Ewe, we were a formidable convoy of about thirty ships in all. Our escort vessels included, frigates, destroyers, corvettes and “baby” air craft carriers (escort carriers). The cargo ships were also armed. Our liberty ship had, in addition to the normal crew of forty-four men, a navy gun crew of eighteen which manned the two three-inch fifty caliber-type cannons, several twenty-millimeter Oerlikon anti-aircraft guns and lighter caliber machine guns.
The convoy, we understood, was also given distant cover by a British battleship and cruiser of the home fleet, which lay just out of sight. Further protection was afforded by the winter solstice which provided virtually twenty-four hours of darkness.
The crew’s quarters were midship, the portholes looking out on the aft deck cargo. There were several narrow gauge train engines lashed to the deck. Heading northeast, we entered the Norwegian Sea, one of the world’s stormiest seas. It didn’t take much imagination to visualize the engines breaking loose and crashing through our bunks. It certainly didn’t make for a relaxed voyage,
but then neither did the Germans.
German sub packs hounded us throughout the voyage. Our reminder of their presence was the constant dropping of depth charges which shook everything and everyone on ship as the bulkheads quivered and the deck plates rattled. But we were lucky. It was later revealed that no less than eighteen U-boats were lying in ambush for our convoy. When we arrived in Murmansk, we learned that only one escort frigate had been damaged by a torpedo.
Our convoy was routed unusually close to the Norwegian coast, probably not more than seventy-five miles offshore. The normal route took convoys far from German occupied Norway. It was understood that we were attempting to lure the battleship Von Tirpitz out of the fjords. A year before, her sister ship, the Scharnhorst had slipped out to attack a similar convoy and, after a long chase, was sunk by the British Navy. But this time the Von Tirpitz did not accept the challenge and remained in the fjord.
Off North Cape we were attacked by a formation of sixteen German torpedo bombers. General alarm was sounded. I rushed to my position as assistant loader on the Oerlikon gun, life jacket slung around my neck and rubber suit under my arm. The engagement lasted only a few minutes. Heavy fire from our entire convoy quickly brought down three planes and drove the others off. They did manage to drop a few torpedoes, but they went astray, doing no damage.
We finally dropped anchor in the Kola Inlet in early November. Half our convoy, including our ship, unloaded our cargo in Murmansk. The remaining ships sailed across the White Sea and on to Archangel. Our first sight of Murmansk was the badly battered dock and railroad spurs. It was a prime target for the Luftwaffe, which had a base in Petsamo, Finland, barely sixty miles from Murmansk. By the time I got there, the Soviets had installed so many heavy anti-aircraft guns and had brought down so many planes that the bombing was greatly reduced.
At last we were ashore in Murmansk. Formerly the Russians had given a $125 bonus to each seaman for making the run. This was a gesture of appreciation and provided money to spend in
port. But at the behest of the U.S. government, they had stopped this practice. We drew money from the captain to spend ashore.
At last ashore, the Russian language sounded beautiful to me. On the voyage over I had spent several hours a day boning up on my Russian. Once ashore, I became fluent again and found myself translating for my shipmates.
There was no doubt Murmansk was a front line town. There were only two places to go for relaxation and diversion. There was the International Seamen’s Club and the International Hotel. At the club there were often American movies and dances on a Saturday night.
The crews from the convoy crowded into the Seamen’s Club and were soon drinking the good old Russian vodka. But we soon discovered that vodka, unlike whisky, was not a liquor to be drunk neat as was the American custom. Under the influence of the vodka the meekest fellows soon became roaring lions. Several fights broke out. The Russians looked on with amazement at this.
“What’s the matter with you Americans? ” they asked after finding that I could speak Russian. “Can’t you take your liquor?”
’‘Ah well, they’re just blowing off steam after the terrible tension of the voyage,” I answered.
Thereafter, the Russians restricted the Americans to one drink of vodka in the club, which was equivalent to a double in our measure. On our part, a few of us union guys got together and constituted ourselves as an ad hoc committee to maintain order ashore. We served notice that henceforth any seaman who caused trouble and was giving the crew a bad name would have his shore leave taken away for the duration of our stay in port. We posted notices to that effect on the bulletin board of the club. The Russians were very pleased with our self-disciplinary action.
My Russian came right back and I spent a lot of time in the clubs and met a whole number of Russians. They took me around to the factories and Russian clubs. Among my friends was the ship chandler who took me out to his home and introduced me to his family. I was sitting in his office one day when two white American seamen came in. They asked the chandler if he could sell them some vodka. He told them that he wasn’t permitted to sell to
individuals, that they would have to get a permit from the captain of the ship. The chandler could understand a lot of English but he couldn’t speak the language, so I volunteered to translate. My proffered help was met by a hostile stare by these two drunks. I heard their drawl and knew where they were from. One, the most belligerent, glared at me.
“Who’s talkin’ to you? Keep out of this,” he growled.
“Well, I know Russian and thought I could help you.”
“We don’t need your help. We’re from Texas.”
“Well, good,” I rejoined, “some of my best friends are from Texas.”
I stood up and put my hand on the water bottle on the chandler’s desk. They turned and walked out of the place.
The chandler was taking it all in, apprehensive that something was going to happen. “Comrade,” he said, “I’m so glad you didn’t allow yourself to be provoked.”
He told me that a year ago, a Black seaman had been killed right there in Murmansk by white seamen. “Do Black people always have to fear for their lives in the United States?” he asked, puzzled.
“Well, one can expect attack at anytime, but not all whites are hostile. And Blacks have their own communities.”
He seemed puzzled by the whole thing. “I guess it’s like the Jews under the old regime,” he said.
“Precisely,” I agreed.
I went over to the International Hotel and joined some of my white shipmates sitting around a table. I told them about what had happened at the chandler’s. Just then the two fellows came in and sat down at the next table. One of my mates, a reconstructed Southerner—Texas Red we called him—got up and started talking loudly about “god damn rednecks.” The two slunk out of the bar and that was the end of it. We figured they were members of the SIU, a Jim Crow seamen’s union.
Another night I came into the International Hotel and after checking my boots and coat, I saw a group of young Russians, men and women, standing in the lobby. It was on the eve of the anniversary of the Russian Revolution. They saw me speaking Russian to the attendant, so one young Russian approached me.
He was a small fellow, dressed in the Georgian manner with long coat, hat and soft Caucasian boots.
“I think I know you,” he said. “Weren’t you in Moscow some years back?”
“Yes, I was,” I answered, surprised.
“Don’t you remember my sisters Vera and Era?” Vera and Era were two young women in our circle.
“Oh yes,” I said, “how are they?”
“I was just a small boy when you would come around. Vera married Patterson, the American Black man who came over with the film troupe. He died in the evacuation from Moscow.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “How is she doing now?”
“Fine,” he said. “She has a nice apartment and her two sons are coming along well.”
I was just about to ask about Ina, who had also been a part of that same circle, when he broke off, explaining that he had to go to a performance as he was a member of a dance troupe.
“Meet me back here tomorrow night,” he said.
I came back to the hotel the next night, but he wasn’t there. He probably had another performance. I didn’t know his name or how to ask for him. Sadly, I never saw him again.
Not too long after we arrived in Murmansk, we received word that the Von Tirpitz had been sunk (November 12, 1944) in a successful attack by twenty-eight Lancaster bombers of the Royal Air Force. This was certainly welcome news for it meant the end of the major German naval threat to convoys on the Murmansk run. We were relieved to know our return trip would not be threatened.
The human enemy was more or less taken care of, but the old enemy, the sea itself, was there to be reckoned with. The Norwegian Sea was a brutal sea, particularly rough at that time of year. Terrible gales buffeted the convoy and dispersed it over the whole area. Separated from the rest of the ships, we were forced to run alone. The decks, fore and aft, were awash continuously. We struggled into Loch Ewe one by one.
The return voyage was fairly uneventful. But even that late in the war, German submarines were still a very real threat. I remember we were almost home, just off Buzzards Bay in
Massachusetts. There was a submarine scare, and depth charges shook the whole ship violently. One of our mates, a fireman, was down in his quarters counting up his hours. He came up frustrated as hell, “Everytime I started counting, a depth charge would go off and I’d have to start all over.”
It was seventeen below when we docked in Portland, Maine, on January 11, 1945. That night we took the train to New York City. The Russians had given every seaman at Murmansk a gallon of good vodka. On the way down to New York we broke them open and shared them with the passengers. The first thing we did when we got off the train was go to the Cafe Society downtown and see Billie Holiday, the Black singer.
After a week or ten days in New York, I took the train home to Los Angeles. I was happy to return to Belle and we had a warm reunion, exchanging stories, discussing the war and the political developments.
It wasn’t long before I became anxious to get back to sea. In March I signed on a motorship we called the Turk’s Knot. It was ■smaller than the liberty ship, but brand new, just out of the yards. It carried the most modern equipment, along with a crew of thirteen plus the naval gun crew.
/ ’We sailed in early March for the Pacific war zone. It was understood that our destination would be the Philippines, with stops in Honolulu, Wake, the Truk Islands and Guam. Our ship would then shuttle between New Guinea and Manila carrying installations and other war materiel the Americans had been forced to leave behind as they moved northward island by island.
Our first stop in the Philippines was the port city of Cebu, located on an island of the same name, right in the center of the Philippine Archipelago. Cebu was next to the island of Mactun. There in 1521, Magellan was killed while circumnavigating the earth for the first time.
Cebu, surrounded by lush tropics, was a beautiful town as were its people. Paul, our Filipino chief cook, took me on the rounds of the town, introducing me to many friendly and hospitable people.
We left Cebu for Manila, the capital city on the big island of Luzon. The Bay of Manila was clogged with sunken vessels, a
virtual graveyard of ships. They were undoubtedly an overspill from the crucial battle for the Gulf of Leyte, which took place on the eastern side of the islands in October 1944. It was here that Admiral Nimitz’s fleet had put the finish on the Japanese Navy and MacArthur’s troops returned as he had vowed.
The wreckage was so great we had to anchor a mile or two out in the harbor and go into town on water taxis.
In Manila, a friend and I ran into a group of revolutionary students and intellectuals who had ties with the Hukbalahap guerillas, or “Huks.” They had been active in the anti-Japanese resistance movement and bitter struggles against the traitorous compradors and landlords who had aided them. They told us how, after the Huks and the underground had helped to recapture Manila, they had been disarmed by American troops. They were bitter and sharply critical of MacArthur’s hostility toward the popular democratic movement. His clear intention was to return to the status quo of colonialism. They gave us lots of their literature and during the following months of our shuttle we saw them whenever we were in Manila.
From Manila we would sail southward to New Guinea. Stopping at the small port towns of Hollandia, Wewak and Oro Bay, all on the north coast of New Guinea, we would gather our cargo of war materiel and return to Manila. The round trip of some thirty-six hundred miles would take about fourteen to twenty days.
HOMECOMING AT WAR’S END
In April we received news that Roosevelt had died. The news saddened the crew, everyone seemed to realize that Roosevelt’s death marked the end of an era.
Early in the summer a letter from Belle reached me in Holland. My fears were realized—the Communist Party had been dissolved and the Communist Political Association (CPA) had been founded in April 1944. Belle informed me of the recently published Duclos letter and the removal of Earl Browder from
leadership. Duclos, then secretary of the French Communist Party, sent a letter to the National Board of the CPA which was received on May 20. In this letter he characterized Browder’s Teheran thesis and the subsequent dissolution of the Party as a “notorious revision of Marxism.”8 The publication of the letter opened a floodgate of criticism with regards to Browder’s position. It came at a time when events were rapidly proving that his theories of “class peace” and national unity under the leadership of the monopolists were grossly incorrect and did not in any way correspond to reality.
The Duclos letter opened the way for struggle in opposition to Browder. The groundswell of opposition reached the national leadership and led to the Emergency Convention of July 26-28, 1945, where the errors of the past were exposed and the Party was reconstituted.
I was very excited by this letter and anxious to return to the States. I was not disappointed, therefore, when we learned that our ship had developed engine trouble and our scheduled twelve to eighteen month voyage would be cut short.
We had scarcely left New Guinea on the trip home when news came over the ship’s radio that an atom bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima. It was August 6,1945. Three days later we learned that a second and more powerful bomb had been dropped at Nagasaki. We knew then that it would not be long before the Japanese surrendered.
What we didn’t know and what has generally been overlooked is that the day after Hiroshima the Russians invaded Manchuria in a powerful two-pronged offensive. The devastation wreaked by the atom bombs was indescribable, but its details were not fully known, either in Japan or the United States, until months afterward. But everyone in Japan was aware of the Russian invasion and it was probably this threat of war on two fronts which was a considerable factor in forcing Japan to accept the reality of its defeat.9
I landed in San Francisco on August 24, 1945, ten days after VJ day. I immediately called Belle and she came up to meet me. The emergency convention to reconstitute the Party had taken place the
month before. For the first time I was able to study the Duclos letter, as well as the documents from the convention. Included in these was the letter written by Foster, opposing Browder’s Teheran thesis. Foster had submitted the letter on Jan. 20, 1944, to the National Committee where it was rejected overwhelmingly. It was not until the emergency convention that this letter was made public and anyone outside of the National Committee knew of Foster’s opposition to Browder.10
We spent a week or so relaxing and discussing what we should be doing now. We decided to go back to New York. I went first to find an apartment. Belle packed up our belongings in Los Angeles and closed the apartment.